1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a multilayer ceramic capacitor and a method of manufacturing the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, electronic components using a ceramic material, such as a capacitor, an inductor, a piezoelectric element, a varistor, a thermistor, or the like, include a ceramic body formed of a ceramic material, internal electrodes formed within the ceramic body, and external electrodes mounted on a surface of the ceramic body so as to be connected to the internal electrodes.
Among ceramic electronic components, a multilayer ceramic capacitor includes a plurality of stacked dielectric layers, internal electrodes disposed to face each other, having the dielectric layer interposed therebetween, and external electrodes electrically connected to the internal electrodes.
Multilayer ceramic capacitors have been widely used as components in mobile communications devices such as computers, personal digital assistants (PDA), mobile phones, and the like, due to inherent advantages thereof such as a small size, high capacitance, mountability, and the like.
Recently, as electronic products have been miniaturized and multi-functionalized, chip components have also tended to be miniaturized and multi-functionalized. Therefore, a small sized multilayer ceramic capacitor having high capacitance has been demanded.
In addition, the multilayer ceramic capacitor has been usefully used as a bypass capacitor disposed within a power supply circuit in a large scale integration (LSI) scheme. The multilayer ceramic capacity needs to have capability to effectively remove high frequency noise in order to serve as the bypass capacitor. This demand has been further increased in accordance with the trend for electronic devices having high frequencies. The multilayer ceramic capacitor used as the bypass capacitor may be electrically connected to a mounting pad on a circuit board through soldering, and the mounting pad may be connected to other external circuits through wiring patterns or conductive vias on the circuit board.
The multilayer ceramic capacitor has equivalent series resistance (ESR) and equivalent series inductance (ESL) components in addition to a capacitance component. These ESR and ESL components may hinder a function of the bypass capacitor. Particularly, the ESL increases inductance of the capacitor at a high frequency to thereby hinder high frequency noise removal characteristics.